Citation Verification Agent for Perth Estate Planning Lawyers: Verify Every Authority Before You File the Probate Application

You’re drafting submissions for a contested estate matter listed in the Supreme Court of Western Australia. The will is unusual, the family provision claim is live, and you’ve leaned on an AI assistant to pull together a first cut of the authorities on testamentary capacity and the Family Provision Act 1972 (WA). The citations look orderly. You haven’t had time to pull every case from AustLII to verify them line-by-line. Under the Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules — which apply to WA solicitors as the Legal Profession Uniform Law Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules from 1 July 2022 — the citation is your responsibility, not the model’s. The Citation Verification Agent is built to catch the failure before lodgement.

The problem

Estate practice runs on a tight rhythm of probate applications, grants, family provision responses, and trust advice — work that is heavily authority-dependent and increasingly drafted with AI assistance. A language model that produces fluent prose will also produce fluent-sounding citations: a plausible case name, a plausible year, a paragraph reference that scans as real. The Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules — adopted in Western Australia under the Legal Profession Uniform Law from 1 July 2022 — restate the solicitor’s duty to the court and the standards of conduct expected of members of the profession. Rule 19 (duty to the court and candour) covers the accuracy of authorities tendered to the court, whether typed by the solicitor, an associate, or generated by a model whose output went unchecked.

Manual verification at the pace of a probate list or a family provision deadline is impractical for any document with more than a handful of authorities. The risk surface is the document, not the drafter’s intent.

What the Citation Verification Agent does

The Citation Verification Agent is the core feature of RuleCheck by Exegesis — a local-first, deterministic, no-external-LLM pre-lodgement checker for Australian legal teams. It extracts every cited authority from your draft and checks each one against an Australian authority registry covering the High Court, Federal Court, Federal Circuit and Family Court, State Supreme Courts (including WA), and AustLII. Each citation comes back with a status — verified, mismatched (wrong court, year or paragraph), or not found — and a recommended action.

The agent does not generate new legal content, does not transmit your draft to external LLMs, and does not retain content beyond the configured retention window. That narrow scope is the trust posture.

How it works

  1. Upload your draft (.txt or .md) — submissions, family provision response, affidavit, or letter of advice — to the RuleCheck interface.
  2. The agent extracts every authority reference using deterministic citation pattern matching (no model inference on the content of your draft).
  3. Each citation is queried against the authority registry (AustLII and state court catalogues).
  4. A structured readiness report returns per-citation status: verified, mismatched, or not found, with the recommended action.
  5. Archive the markdown report alongside the matter file as part of your AI-use audit trail.

Processing typically completes in seconds to a minute for documents under 10 pages.

Why this matters in Perth

Western Australia adopted the Legal Profession Uniform Law on 1 July 2022, and from the same date the Legal Profession Uniform Law Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules 2015 apply to WA solicitors. The ASCR are, in the Law Council’s words, “a statement of professional and ethical obligations derived from solicitors’ duties as an officer of the court, the common law and equity, legislation, and the collective judgment of the legal profession”. Estate work in WA sits across the Supreme Court of Western Australia probate jurisdiction and the family provision regime under the Family Provision Act 1972 (WA) — both depend on accurate citation of authority. A fictitious or misattributed case in a family provision submission is not a clerical issue; it engages the candour duty owed to the court under the rules a Perth solicitor is bound by. The Citation Verification Agent is designed so that responsibility can be discharged at the pace estate practice actually runs at.

Sources

Exegesis capability references:

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Join the waitlist — be the first to know when pricing and access tiers launch for Perth estate planning teams

RuleCheck’s Citation Verification Agent is live in beta. We’re scoping the right pricing structure (per-filing, per-user monthly, or firm-licence) based on demand from estate and probate practitioners. Join the waitlist and we’ll let you know when access opens — and what we hear from you will shape how the pricing tier you sit in actually works.